Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  Their Jerry Michaelson wasn’t about to let him off so easily. “When will you catch this monster who’s been terrorizing South Bay senior women for so long?”

  “Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like better.” Colin’s impatience was starting to show. He’d always had a short fuse with reporters. “If you’ve got any good ideas, I’d love to hear ’em.”

  Michaelson started to splutter. The news cut back to the studio. The blonde in the tight sweater deplored the cops’ failure to apprehend anybody. She had a little trouble with apprehend, but managed almost well enough.

  Then a Filipina nurse walked in, and Louise stopped worrying about the news. “How you feeling?” the young woman asked.

  “Run over by a truck,” Louise answered honestly.

  The nurse’s eyes widened. She laughed. “Oh, I bet you do,” she said. “Having a baby not easy for anybody, harder when you get a little older.” That was a polite way to put it. The nurse grabbed a gadget on a pole, stuck Louise’s finger in a clip, and wrapped a cuff around her arm. The cuff inflated painfully tight, then relaxed. The nurse wrote in the chart.

  “Well?” Louise always wanted to know what was what.

  “Blood pressure good. Blood oxygen normal.” The nurse stuck something in Louise’s ear, then wrote again. “Temperature normal, too. You okay.” Except you’re crazy. She didn’t come out with it, but it was written all over her face.

  “Oh, boy.” Louise fought a yawn. Then she didn’t fight it any more. She’d earned the right to be worn out, by God! And she knew she’d better sleep while she had any chance at all. The baby sure wouldn’t let her once she got home. She wanted a shower, too; she was all over greasy sweat. But she lacked the energy right now. Tomorrow would do.

  “Epesiotomy hurt?” the nurse asked.

  “It’s starting to,” Louise admitted. They’d given her a local down there while they sewed her up. It was wearing off now. One more delight of childbirth she’d managed to forget. If women remembered all the lovely details, they would never have more than one kid, and the human race would have vanished a long time ago.

  “Father come see baby?” the nurse inquired.

  “I doubt it.” Louise’s voice was colder than supervolcano winter in Greenland. If Teo had wanted anything to do with his oops of an offspring . . . If he’d wanted anything to do with the kid, a lot of things now would be different. But he damn well hadn’t, and they damn well weren’t. “I don’t expect any visitors.”

  “No?” The Filipina girl’s eyebrows rose. “Too bad. You have pretty baby.”

  Those things were relative. Newborn babies weren’t the cute, laughing things they became in a few months. James Henry was very pink, he had next to no hair, and he looked like a Conehead because he’d got kind of squashed coming out. That he would look that way, at least, Louise had recalled.

  Shaking her head, the nurse went away. The news was doing the weather report. It would be chilly and rainy. It was either chilly and rainy or just plain chilly most of the time. And L.A. had it way better than most of the country.

  Dinner came. It was unexciting hospital food, a redundancy if ever there was one. Louise didn’t care. In the classic phrase, she could have eaten a horse and chased the driver.

  An attendant wheeled in the Korean lady in the other bed. She’d just got her tray when her husband showed up. They pulled the curtain and chattered in their own language, with occasional English words thrown in. It reminded Louise of Mr. Nobashi talking to Hiroshima, though neither side of this couple was in the habit of yelling, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  Then Colin walked in.

  Louise knew she looked like hell. She felt like hell, too. And she wasn’t only sore and beat. All her hormones were working on emergency overdrive. It wasn’t the ideal moment for a visit from an ex-husband, in other words.

  “Come to gloat, did you?” she snapped.

  His face never showed much. That was a useful attribute for a cop, but it had always irked her. His mouth did tighten a little; she’d managed to piss him off. “Well, I can always leave if you want me to,” he said. “I heard you’d had the baby, and I wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “I’m trampled, that’s how,” Louise replied.

  “I remember,” he said. “But you’re okay, and the kid is, too?” He waited for her to nod, then did the same himself. “Good. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

  “Does Kelly know you’re here?” Louise asked, a touch of acid in her voice.

  “Uh-huh.” Colin nodded again. “She gets that I wasn’t rolled up in bubble wrap before we ran into each other. There’s still stuff in my life from days gone by.”

  “Like the Strangler,” Louise said.

  His mouth didn’t just tighten this time. It twisted. “Yeah. Like him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louise said. The rational part of her, what there was of it right this minute, knew she’d hit too hard. He’d done more for her after she got knocked up by the other man than an ex had to, more than most exes would have. The checks he’d sent really had helped her out.

  “One of these days, I will catch him. I’ll see they stick a needle in his arm, too,” Colin said.

  “I hope you do.” Louise meant that.

  “Marshall says maybe he’ll come tomorrow.” Colin shifted gears. “He was working on something now, typing away pretty fast.”

  “Okay.” If Marshall wanted thing one to do with her, that would be an improvement. If he could be persuaded to help take care of the baby when she had to go back to work . . . She had hopes. “Will he really make a writer?”

  “Believe it or not, I think stranger things have happened. Who woulda thunk it?” Colin awkwardly dipped his head. “Listen, I better get home. I did want to check on you, though. Take care of yourself, Louise.” He lumbered out of the room.

  Now, when she most wanted to sleep, Louise found she couldn’t. The Korean couple on the other side of the curtain didn’t bother her. They wouldn’t have bothered her if they were speaking English. Memory had more weight. She was still wide awake when the Filipina nurse brought in James Henry. Louise set the baby on her breast. He rooted, then settled down and started to nurse.

  * * *

  Rank, they said (whoever the hell they were), had its privileges. Vanessa Ferguson thought blowing the FEMA dweeb was odds-on the rankest thing she’d ever done, but that also had its privileges. Every once in a while, for instance, Micah Husak let her use his computer. In Camp Constitution, with next to no electricity, that was more precious than rubies.

  Or it would have been, had it done her any good. Before she moved to Denver, she’d banked with Wells Fargo. Had she kept her money there, she could have got at it here. She could have got the hell out of here, in fact. Even Fort Smith looked like heaven next to this.

  But she’d gone native. She’d put her money into the Rocky Mountains Savings Bank. It paid higher interest. You could deal with human beings who actually seemed to care about what you wanted. It was local.

  Yes, it was local. And there, as Hamlet said, was the rub. Wells Fargo had servers all over the country—all over the world, as far as Vanessa knew. The Rocky Mountains Savings Bank had servers in, well, Denver. Whoever’d set up their data system hadn’t anticipated a supervolcano eruption burying the place in several feet of ash and dust.

  And so, whenever Vanessa accessed their Web site, all she got was a ’90s GIF of a couple of sawhorses and some yellow-and-black tape, with the all-caps legend UNDER CONSTRUCTION below it.

  “Shit!” she snarled when she saw it yet again. By all the signs, that site would stay under construction till the day after doomsday. Her bank account was as one with Nineveh and Tyre . . . and Denver.

  Micah had himself wiped off and his trousers (as opposed to his cock) up again. He looked over her s
houlder. “How unfortunate for you,” he said.

  She glared at him. “Yeah, you really think so, don’t you? If I had the money to bail, you think I’d stick around here to get your rocks off?” She did what he wanted. She didn’t have to waste time being polite about it.

  Neither did he. “There are others,” he answered, shrugging. And there were bound to be. Men wanted the pleasure women could give them. Some women would always give that pleasure in exchange for what they could get from the men they did it for. If that made them want to break every mirror they owned afterwards, hey, it was a rough old world.

  There was a word for women who gave in exchange for what they could get. No cash changed hands in these transactions. Vanessa knew the word stuck to her all the same.

  “You must have relatives you could get a loan from,” Micah said.

  She’d chewed on that before. Her father probably would front her the money to get back to California, or at least out of the camp. She’d had too much pride to ask him. She’d made her own way since she dropped out of college to try the real world instead. Asking him for anything would seem like failure.

  So what exactly do you call sucking this guy’s joint in exchange for a better tent and a chance to use the Net once in a while? she asked herself. But this was—or she’d always figured this was—temporary. Once she got the hell out of here, she could always pretend Micah Husak had never been born. Taking money from her old man was different. She wouldn’t forget it. Neither would he.

  “I don’t want to do that,” she said after a short pause.

  “Evidently not.” His smile showed off that half-missing front tooth. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry you don’t.”

  It was a peculiar kind of smile, but she needed only a moment to recognize it. He didn’t just get off on having her go down on him. Anybody could do that. He got off on having her go down on him even though—or rather, especially because—she hated it. She was acquainted with those complicated pleasures, too. They turned out to be less enjoyable when you were on the wrong end.

  “I think I’d better go,” she said, her voice thick with not-quite-suppressed fury. It was a good thing for the dweeb that they made you check your firearms before you walked into the FEMA building. Otherwise, he would have been lying on the floor with that nasty smile still on his face and with the back of his head blown out.

  “Er—yes,” he said. If her rage didn’t give him pause, he was even dumber than she thought—and that was saying something. But he had, or figured he had, the whip hand, because he added, “I’ll see you again before too long.”

  Vanessa grunted and got out of there as fast as she could. Doing what she wanted to do would make her happy now, but she’d be sorry for a long time later. No, she wouldn’t be sorry. Nothing that happened to Micah Husak could make her sorry. But she didn’t want to spend umpty-ump years in jail, either.

  No? What do you call this place? Even jail food might be better than MREs. She tried not to think like that as she stormed down the corridor to the back door. Thinking like that would leave the dweeb dead and bleeding.

  The big black guy who stood guard there studied her thoughtfully. “You sure I ought to give you back your piece right now?” he asked, doubt all over his voice and on his face. “Maybe everybody’d do better if you came back for it later.”

  “I’m okay,” Vanessa said. And so she was, as long as she didn’t think about looking at Micah Husak’s blind snake from eye-crossingly close range. Trying not to think about something, of course, was as impossible as usual. Grinding her teeth, she made herself go on, “I won’t plug the son of a bitch no matter how much he deserves it.”

  “Huh.” The guard seemed no happier. He explained why: “You don’t want to go hurting yourself, neither. We got too much of that around here.”

  He had his reasons for worrying. The number of people at Camp Constitution and all the rest of the refugee centers near the edge of the ashfall line who took the long road out was a national shame and disgrace—or it was when the rest of the United States wasn’t full of its own screams of anguish. The camps didn’t—couldn’t—even got noticed a lot of the time.

  All the same, suicide wasn’t on Vanessa’s radar, not the way turning the dweeb into a colander was. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she assured the black man. “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.” She gave him other kinds of satisfaction: not just getting his rocks off but making her blow him when she would rather have blown him away.

  “Well, okay,” the guard said slowly. Even more slowly, he turned around, took her .38 out of its slot, and handed it back to her. “Don’t you do anything silly, now, you hear?” He had a deep, buttery-rich voice, as if he ought to be singing gospel music instead of standing here in a polyester uniform and a Stetson.

  “I won’t,” Vanessa answered reluctantly, because she really did feel as if saying that to him was like making a promise. It wasn’t as if she’d never broken a promise or told a lie, but even so . . .

  “Better not,” he said. “That’d be a waste, you know?”

  “What difference does any one person make?” Vanessa didn’t try to hide her bitterness. “The whole country’s been wasted. Hell, the whole world’s been wasted.” As soon as she saw the cloud of ash and dust from Yellowstone boiling toward Denver, she’d known nothing would stay the same any more. But she’d had no idea—no one had had any idea—how different from Before After would be.

  “Jesus loves us any which way,” the guard said. “You accept Him as your personal Savior, hon?”

  Vanessa got out of there in a hurry without answering. She didn’t want to talk about religion with him, or with anybody else. If he had one he was happy with, terrific. Groovy, even. But if he wanted to go around inflicting his beliefs on other people, that wasn’t so terrific.

  Of course, he might have tried inflicting himself on her, too, the way the damn dweeb had. That would probably come next. Well, she still had the revolver. And the way things looked, it was a damn good thing she did.

  * * *

  “Ooh-wahh!” James Henry Ferguson owned a voice like an air-raid siren.

  “Shut up, you little bastard,” Marshall Ferguson said. His mother—and James Henry’s—wasn’t there to disapprove of his literal accuracy. It wasn’t feeding time at the zoo yet—pretty soon, but not quite yet. Marshall went into the bedroom to find out why his tiny half-brother had ants in his pants.

  Only it wouldn’t be ants. It would be something a lot more disgusting than ants. What babies could do to breast milk and formula . . . Guys made gross-out jokes all the way from second grade through high school. Dealing with genuine, no-shit shit, though, was something the guys making those jokes mostly didn’t know thing one about.

  Marshall stuck a finger in there. He pulled it out slimy and yellow-brown. This wouldn’t be the first diaper he’d changed on his half-brother. His stomach still lurched as if the plane of his life had hit an air pocket every time he did it, though.

  James Henry wiggled aimlessly while Marshall got him out of the soiled Huggy and cleaned crap off his bottom. Eventually, Mom said, he’d be able to fight back when he got changed. He hadn’t figured that out yet, though. Something else I get to look forward to, Marshall thought gloomily.

  What he did look forward to was getting paid. He was still writing. He hadn’t sold anything since he graduated, though. His father wasn’t on his case about it. Dad didn’t need to be. Marshall was on his own case.

  Before he could even close the new diaper’s tapes, his half-brother peed in it. Marshall kept a piece of cloth over his middle. He’d got it in the face once, but only once. He learned fast, if not quite fast enough.

  “Well, piss,” Marshall muttered. Piss it was, all right. He rolled up the new diaper and chucked it into the plastic pail after the other one. The sack inside was filling fa
st. The reek of stale urine got him in the nose again. Baby poop didn’t stink as much as what grown-ups produced.

  One more diaper went onto James Henry’s bottom. The kid didn’t ruin this one before Marshall could get it all the way on to him. A good thing, too, as far as Marshall was concerned. There was talk the authorities would stop letting disposable diapers come into L.A. They took up room that could go to food and fuel instead.

  Marshall eyed the baby. “What do I do then?” he asked, not altogether rhetorically. Oh, he knew the answer: cloth diapers and safety pins, right out of Ozzie and Harriet and The Lucy Show. But how were you supposed to fasten those without sticking the kid who was wearing them? If the disposables stopped coming, he’d damn well find out.

  He picked up James Henry. The baby had a lot of coal-black hair. He was swarthier than Marshall or Vanessa or Rob—swarthier than Mom, too. Anybody would think his father was Mexican or something.

  Changing him changed the note on which he cried, but didn’t shut him up. Marshall pulled out his phone. Yeah, now it was feeding time at the zoo, all right. He carried James Henry into the kitchen. Mom had expressed—that was the word she used for it—enough breast milk to keep the little bugger from starving before she got home.

  Marshall heated it in the microwave, waited till it cooled down some, and poured it from measuring cup to bottle. James Henry ate, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Marshal didn’t figure he would have been, either. Given a choice between a rubber nipple and the real thing, he would have taken the McCoy every time.

  But his half-brother didn’t have the choice, not with Mom back at work. He didn’t refuse his bottle; he just didn’t like it as well as a tit. After he finished, Marshall got a hell of a burp out of him. If James Henry had known the alphabet, he could have made it at least to R. A guy who’d chugged a couple of cans of Coors would have been proud of this one.

  After chow, the baby showed signs of sacking out again. Marshall stuck his finger inside the diaper. James Henry was dry. “Yesss!” Marshall said. Changing him again might have perked him up. This way . . .